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In the first part of this talk, I'll recall the construction of category of games and innocent deterministic strategies introduced by Harmer, Hyland and Mellies [1]. Compared with the original method by Hyland and Ong [2], this method holds two specific advantages. First, it outlines the structural conditions on certain games and strategies by introducing separate entities (the schedules) that focus most of the required proof work. Second, the methods lays out a pretty clear combinatorial ‘recipe’ that could be replicated in other settings. That will be the goal of the second part of the talk, which will develop a 2-categorical and sheaf-theoretic formulation of non-deterministic innocent strategies, based on this ‘recipe’. During the course of this construction, I'll outline specific properties that give us a better understanding of both deterministic and non-deterministic strategies.

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The lambda-calculus possesses a strong notion of extensionality, called ``the omega-rule'', which has been the subject of many investigations. It is a longstanding open problem whether the equivalence obtained by closing the theory of Böhm trees under the omega-rule is strictly included in Morris's original observational theory, as conjectured by Sallé in the seventies. We will first show that Morris's theory satisfies the omega-rule. We will then demonstrate that the two aforementioned theories actually coincide, thus disproving Sallé's conjecture.

The proof technique we develop is general enough to provide as a byproduct a new characterization, based on bounded eta-expansions, of the least extensional equality between Böhm trees.

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Herbrand's theorem, widely regarded as a cornerstone of proof theory, exposes some of the constructive content of classical logic. In its simplest form, it reduces the validity of a first-order purely existential formula to that of a finite disjunction. More generally, it gives a reduction of first-order validity to propositional validity, by understanding the structure of the assignment of first-order terms to existential quantifiers, and the causal dependency between quantifiers. In this paper, we show that Herbrand's theorem in its general form can be elegantly stated as a theorem in the framework of concurrent games. The causal structure of concurrent strategies, paired with annotations by first-order terms, is used to specify the dependency between quantifiers. Furthermore concurrent strategies can be composed, yielding a compositional proof of Herbrand's theorem, simply by interpreting classical sequent proofs in a well-chosen denotational model.

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Game semantics is a class of denotational models for programming languages, in which types are interpreted as games and programs as strategies. In order to interpret pure programs, one has to restrict to innocent strategies. Two key results then entail that they are the morphisms of a category: associativity of composition and stability of innocence. These are non-trivial results, and significant work, notably by Melliès, has been devoted to better understanding them. Recently, games models have been extended to concurrent languages, using presheaves as generalised strategies and recasting innocence as a sheaf condition. We here revisit composition of strategies in concurrent game semantics with abstract categorical tools that make most of the reasoning automatic and extract the few crucial lemmas that give composition of strategies all its desired properties. The approach applies to non-concurrent strategies as well.

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The Cook-Levin theorem (the statement that SAT is NP-complete) is a central result in structural complexity theory. What would a proof of the Cook-Levin theorem look like if the reference model of computation were not Turing machines but the lambda-calculus? We will see that exploring the alternative universe of ``structural complexity with lambda-terms instead of Turing machines'' brings up a series of interesting questions, both technical and philosophical. Some of these have satisfactory answers, leading us in particular to a proof of the Cook-Levin theorem using tools of proof-theoretic and semantic origin (linear logic, Scott continuity), but many others are fully open, leaving us wondering about the interactions (or lack thereof) between complexity theory and proof theory/programming languages theory.

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Two polynomials f and g are said to be algebraically dependent over a field K if there exists a non-zero bivariate polynomial A with coefficients in K such that A(f,g)=0. If no such polynomial exists, we say that f and g are independent. This is a natural generalization of linear independence to higher degrees. We consider the problem of finding an algorithm to test whether the given set of polynomials are algebraically independent. When the field has characteristic zero, this problem has a randomised polynomial time algorithm using the Jacobian Matrix of the given polynomials. However the criterion fails when the polynomials are taken over the fields of positive characteristic. One can expect that the positive characteristic case also has an efficient algorithm for testing algebraic independence, however, the existing best known upper bound is very far from desired. The talk will cover a result which is an attempt to bridge this gap. We present a new algorithm which is based on a refined generalisation of Jacobian criterion in case of fields of positive characteristic. It also yields a structural result about the algebraically dependent polynomials - approximate functional dependence.

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Monotonicity is a fundamental notion in mathematics and computation. For usual real-valued functions R → R this simply corresponds to the notion that a function is increasing (or decreasing) in its argument, however this can be parametrised by any partially ordered domain and codomain we wish. In computation we deal with programs that compute Boolean functions, {0,1}* → {0,1}*. Restricting to increasing functions over this structure can be seen as prohibiting the use of negation in a program; for instance monotone Boolean functions are computed by Boolean circuits without NOT gates. The idea of restricting negation scales to other models of computation, and for some important classes of functions the formulation is naturally robust, not depending on the particular model at hand, e.g. for the polynomial-time functions. Monotone computational problems abound in practice, e.g. sorting a string and detecting cliques in graphs, and 'nonuniform' monotone models of computation, such as monotone circuits, have been fundamental objects of study in computational complexity for decades.

In this talk I will propose a project that develops *logical* characterisations of monotone complexity classes, via a proof theoretic approach. Namely, the project will identify theories of arithmetic whose formally representable functions coincide with certain monotone classes, and also develop fundamental recursion-theoretic programming languages in which to extract the monotone functions themselves. In particular the project focusses on the role of structural proof theory, i.e. the duplication and erasure of formulae, in controlling monotonicity.

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A polyomino P is called 2-convex if for every two cells belonging to P, there exists a monotone path included in P with at most two changes of direction. We present some tomographical properties of 2-convex polyominoes from their horizontal and vertical projections and gives an algorithm that reconstructs them from a given couple of projections. We discuss its complexity.

Thursday 26th January 2017 at 10h
Lama Tarsissi
(LAMA),
Second order balance property on Christoffel words

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Balanced words have been studied a lot in the last decades. In particular, Christoffel words that are a special case of finite balanced words. In this talk, I introduce the Balance matrix that studies the balancedness of these words and I define some tools to extend this property by defining a second order of balancedness. I recall some properties about the continued fraction development and the Stern-Brocot tree to prove a recursive formula based on the shape of the path from the root of the Stern-Brocot. Finally, I show that among all infinite paths in the Stern-Brocot tree, the one that converges to φ, the golden ratio, minimizes the growth of the second order balance.

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Recurrence relations have been of interest since ancient times. Perhaps the most famous is the Fibonacci numbers, where each additional term in the sequence is obtained as the sum of the previous two. I will show how we can use a graphical language of string diagrams–a “graphical linear algebra”–to reason about recurrence relations, and as a bonus, obtain efficient implementations. This application comes from a general string diagrammatic theory of signal flow graphs–a model of computation originally studied by Claude Shannon in the 1940s–developed in collaboration with Filippo Bonchi and Fabio Zanasi, and published at CONCUR 2014 and PoPL 2015.